All posts by sajay

” Tomorrow is my mother’s 18th death anniversary Mom passed away 19 years after my father died, at the age of 64 (my father was 54 when he died). Her hospitalization and death has been one of the most stressful times in my life. Her death was an event that had lasting repercussions on the family in many ways.My Ammachi was the only bonding among her children. It pains me to know that my children and grand children don’t have her in their lives. They’re unaware of what they’re missing. I grieve for the future we’ll never have together. Words cannot express how much she means to me. She taught me so much by her witness of unconditional love, and her beautiful example of enduring strength in suffering. Her faith in God was unshakeable, and her sense of hope undiminishing. Today, more than ever, I miss my sister and brothers.”

It has been a long time since I had halwa this good. To be honest I couldn’t believe it when Mom said that dad made this but it became clear why I had that moment in Ratatouille that Anton Ego had. The recipe was from my grand mom’s sister and for a couple of minutes the taste just transported me to Fort Cochin. If there is any sense that can take you down nostalgia lane, it’s food like this. What I loved was the fact that it had the elements of the halwa that I know and love as well as being better than the ones I have had. Dad definitely did some improvisation which definitely made it better.

In the past few days I have come to understand the pains and more importantly the complexity of the problem space of build engineering. I thought I had a fair understanding of how things work but today is a day I must admit, I realized what a fool I was to think I actually understood anything. Our internal build system is so complex, not sure if it is due to over-engineering or just lack of it. The bottom line is that is not easy. And I don’t expect it to be easy due to nature of how so many teams leverage them.

I am typing this while I wait for a checkin to pass the gate so it can’t be any fresher in thoughts that this. The beauty of the system is that it does serialize the checkin process and even though I do admire CI systems, I have begun to love and respect the aspect of having a single pre-validation system like what we have. I salute you guys who manage to keep this system running so smoothly over the years. I believe as a dev I have taken this for granted but I have come to realize that the sheer complexity of a system like what we have, requires a different degree of passion and love for this problem space. Thank you Build Guru’s.

You would expect programs like VMWare and Virtual PC to actually support booting from a USB stick. If you are just finding out that they don’t like I am and you need some way to get into your USB stick here are some things you can try.

The next issue was to actually boot into the USB. Now after a bit of digging around I found out that the laptop I was using (X220-Thinkpad) does not detect the USB. I tried it on another machine and that worked fine but I needed to get it working on this one since I carry this around. So I decided to some kind of virtualization using VMPlayer.

My new time killer, a WWI era drama show. I’m not really certain why these British shows interest me. Maybe the larger than life characters who spend time drinking expensive wine and women who try to flirt without showing skin are couple of reasons. The bottom line is that after Doc Martin it was hard to find something interesting to watch. If you are looking for characters with money and integrity this show is full of them. That is definitely something that you don’t find in shows these days which thrive on non intelligent humor and racial sarcasm. Downton Abbey engages you in a moral battle in simple yet less than ordinary plots involving not a single character you can associate with but instead you end up empathizing with all of them whole heartedly.

Eli finally got to walk in the snow. He was a little apprehensive about picking up the snow but he managed to walk around and I made a few and threw them for him. I didn’t mind that he was already having a cold since we felt it would unfair on the little guy who just wanted to run outside when he saw the snow. He didn’t even know what it was and his smiles made our day.